September Transatlantic Voyage

As with the last entry, this is more of a photographic essay of our recent European trip.  A description of the entire trip can be found here while the photographic summary of our week in London is here.

On September 5^th we boarded the Caribbean Princess at Southampton for our return to New York City.  For us, it is a large ship, probably the largest we’ve been on, our preference being smaller cruise ships.  This ship has a gross registered tonnage of 113,561 tons, holding a maximum of 3,573 passengers and 1,227 crew.  Its length overall is 946 feet, merely 100 feet shorter than the Chrysler Building in New York City.  It went into service in 2004 and it is showing its age; I understand it is going in for refurbishing this coming spring.  It needs it.  Being an old salt, my first order of business when we got into our room was to inspect the sliding door to our balcony, knowing that was the only barrier between us and potentially high winds and pitching seas.  Although on the 9^th level, I have seen seas that big in our travels.  The door could not be locked.  I examined the door hardware and it was completely corroded.  A sliding, unlocked door in heavy seas is a serious hazard, so I called the desk and to their credit they promptly sent up an engineer who took the door apart and replaced the entire mechanism.  I just wondered how the previous guests failed to note that.

Some other negatives was a library which was devoid of books– and with a full ship and people everywhere –I did my reading in our cabin without the constant interruptions from the activities director – “the casino is open!” or “try your luck at bingo!”  But, admittedly, the Princess Cruise line, like many of them, is trying to appeal to more of a mass market, endeavoring to squeeze every last buck out of each passenger.  The entertainment in the theatre was pedestrian, although they did have a couple of production shows which, for a ship, were decent, including one dedicated to classic Broadway shows.  These were high energy and enjoyable.  

But, please, spare us the comedians, the hypnotists, and the jugglers, etc.  We never went to those.  Actually, the best entertainment was a cocktail timed performance of a violinist and a guitarist who played classical and Great American songbook pieces in the atrium.  But try to find a seat with so many people!

Nonetheless, our choice of making this voyage was predicated on the itinerary and the timing, not the ship itself, especially with multiple ports in Norway and Iceland, two of our favorite places visited in prior trips.  So what follows is primarily a photographic record of our 17 day crossing.

First stop after 229 NM (nautical miles; 1 NM = 1.15 Statute Miles) journey overnight was Rotterdam.  Very little of the old city is left because the Nazis bombed it into submission in four days in 1940, the Netherlands surrendering after witnessing the carnage.   So the city was rebuilt, most in a stark modernist and utilitarian style, a city now of contrasts.

Then onto Bergen, Norway, 572 NM.  We had booked a side tour by boat of the fjords but after seeing Alaskan fjords on two different trips, this was a bit of a disappointment, but still beautiful.  The best part was the city itself and its architecture. 

Still, some of the most beautiful photos were ones on the way to the fjords.

After, lunch at seaside, from the sea,

 

to the table.....

Children on their way to school ...

A short 182 NM trip took us to Flam, the highlight of which was a trip on the Flam railroad and a brief stop at the Flam Kjosfossen Waterfall.

Along the route an amusing sign.

Flam is a picture post card town.

Then 100 NM onto Lerwick, in the remote Shetland Islands of Scotland.  The was to be a tender port and although the ship dropped anchor, due to Gale force winds and heavy swells, the Captain announced he could not commence tender operations, a great disappointment, particularly to the Scottish couple we sat with during lunch – their second such cruise to this destination and neither time could they disembark because of weather.  Thankfully, my telephoto lens brought some of the countryside into view.

A 686 NM journey over the next few nights brought us to Akureyri, Iceland.  It was FREEZING there. The highlights were the Godafoss Waterfall and their small but interesting botanical gardens (yes, a botanical garden in Iceland)!

Akureyri to Isafjordur was a 171 NM journey from hell -- a head sea of up to 27 feet, with a 40 MPH head wind.  But well worth those moments of fear, as the small town of Isafjordur (a year round population of less than the ship’s passengers!) had some of the most picturesque scenes, captured here:

Another 196 NM to Reykjavik.  We were last there in 2012 and enjoyed the 12 hour “golden circle” tour and saw that wonderful part of the country.  This time around we wanted to spend some time in the city itself but again there were near gale winds and it was a raw, drizzly day, not ideal for walking around.  We did disembark but after ten minutes outside we disappointingly headed back to the ship.  Also, that evening we were told that the ship could not leave port because it was pinned to the dock by wind.  The following day, we needed the assistance of two tug boats to pull the ship off the dock and turn it around.

And so began a five day 2,300 NM direct passage to Boston.  It was a relatively benign journey across the North Atlantic.  I noted that at times the ocean temperature was 41 degrees and at one point we passed within a couple hundred miles of where the Titanic went down.  Not much chance of surviving in such waters, hypothermia would be only minutes in those waters.  Those ocean days were great for reading, attending some lectures, going to a specialty restaurant aboard, courtesy of our travel agent, and just staring out at the ocean.

In Boston we spent a wonderful day with our son, Chris, who took off from work, to walk the Boston seaport with us, have lunch by the water and just enjoy being together.

Then, the long 360 NM cruise from Boston to NY, actually Brooklyn where we had been only a couple of months before on a nostalgic tour of my college days.

At night we passed Nantucket and Block Island where we used to take our own boat in my salad days and then finally south of Long Island, into New York Harbor, under the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, to our dock in Brooklyn, the dawn greeting us, the Brooklyn skyline in the foreground.  There our son, Jonathan, met us with our car and we began our drive back to Florida. 

I’d recommend a Transatlantic crossing for the experience, but this one, our fifth, will be our last. Our first was on the original QE2 in 1977.  The ship was built for speed, for a crossing, no stops, and a throwback to a transportation era now long gone.  In many ways, that was the most exhilarating crossing, subconsciously experiencing it as a multitude of prior generations did -- days at sea only, and then arriving at a distant shore.

London Leg of Overseas Trip

I already posted a few pictures of our trip to London and the return via sea, nearly a full month beginning the end of August.  My hope was to post more photographs and let them do the talking; thus this entry on the London leg of the trip. Another one will follow on the transit from Southampton, England, to New York City.

The full narrative on the trip can be found here. 

My years as a publisher brought me to London and Frankfurt on a regular basis, particularly for their book fairs.  My company published academic, reference, and professional books, mostly in the social sciences and the humanities.  There was a substantial market for those publications aboard and to effectively distribute our books throughout Europe we partnered with a relatively young firm at the time, Eurospan, which was run by its charismatic founder, Peter Geelan. Danny Maher was the chief financial officer and over the years we became close to Peter’s family and Danny’s as well.  Our youngest son, Jonathan, was a few years younger than Danny’s two daughters.  We made it a point to visit them at their home in west London. 

There, Danny and Pat, his wife, would prepare a typical English Sunday dinner, our two families, including Danny’s mother (“Mum”) growing closer over the years.  They came to our home in Connecticut to stay with us as well.

After Peter died, his son, Michael, who had been working with Peter, took over the business with Danny.  I also had a close relationship with Peter’s middle son, Jeremy,professionally and personally, who tragically died recently of pancreatic cancer.

So, that sets the stage for our London visit, the main reason was to reconnect with people we consider “family.”

I already posted a similar picture of our “reunion” but this one was with another camera, so I repost:

Our visit to the Eurospan offices, where they’ve been all these years in the heart of Covent Garden but soon will be relocating...

An interesting contrast, Michael, Danny, and me in 1980 and one of us at the recent reunion dinner...

And another English Sunday dinner feast, prepared by Danny and Pat’s daughters, Claire and Lisa, and served at Lisa’s home...

Part of this nostalgic tour was to revisit our “old neighborhood.”  We used to stay at The Cavendish London Hotel near Jermyn St and made a regular routine to visit the exquisite Fortnum and Mason as well as dining at Rowleys...

Then, via underground to Oxford Street.: Ann wanted to do some shopping and I wanted to see Selfridges again, especially after enjoying the BBC/PBS series.  It is impressive how they’ve maintained the building and their high standards...

A trip to London demands time in its great museums and galleries. Here is the National Gallery entrance....

But our greatest pleasure was spending a day at the V&A – the Victoria and Albert Museum.  Its decorative arts and design collection is unparalleled.  Ann’s particular interest was the exhibit from the Jane Austen era.  Here you can see her posing behind one of the waistcoat dresses of the time...

In fact, as I write this, Ann is attending the Jane Austen Society of North America conference in Washington with sister “Janeites.”

Other related exhibits are a music room and sitting area from that era...

I liked the contemporary hanging design entitled Breathless at V&A which is Silver-plated brass wind instruments, flattened and suspended on stainless steel wire...

It was a hot day, even for London when we visited the V&A and having the requisite Scones and Tea for a very late lunch, emerging into an unusually warm day for London...

Not to visit the London stage while there would be heresy.  The narrative link describes the five performances we saw, the one disappointment was not being able to see the Outdoor Theatre performance of Pride and Prejudice in its entirety because of rain.  Here we are having pre-theatre dinner outdoors on the site, in the rain of course!...

I tried to get shots of the stages of the other four plays we saw but was unable to get one for The Entertainer.  Here are ones for In the Heights, The Go Between, and The Truth...

And those are certainly the highlights of our memorable London visit.  And so after a very full week there, we departed for Southampton to board a ship for our transatlantic journey.   That photographic story can be found here.

The Night of the Iguana at Dramaworks – Tennessee Williams’ Poetic Drama

Dramaworks’ opening season traditionally begins with a challenging masterwork, with a full scale cast, and The Night of the Iguana, perhaps Tennessee Williams’ greatest play, is no exception.   This is their first Tennessee Williams play, something director Bill Hayes felt the company could not do until they were ready.  Opening night occurred after one preview performance (delays in rehearsals courtesy of Hurricane Matthew), conceivably an obstacle in making this a totally flawless production.

Under the allegorical canopy of a tropical sky The Night of the Iguana unfolds as two improbable “kinsmen met a night” – the defrocked Reverend Lawrence Shannon and the persevering artist Hannah Jelkes.  Williams’ setting is an unforgiving universe where survival and endurance are requisite attributes.

As an epigram to the play, Williams quotes the last four lines of an Emily Dickinson poem, “I Died for Beauty.”   Shannon and Jelkes are indeed “brethren” in that they are out of place with the rest of the world on the Mexican coast at The Costa Verde Hotel in 1940 – an actual hotel where Williams himself stayed during that time, loosely basing the play on his own personal experience.

I quote the entire poem as it has relevancy in my opinion:

I died for beauty, but was scarce

Adjusted in the tomb,

When one who died for truth was lain

In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?

"For beauty," I replied.

"And I for truth, -the two are one;

We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,

We talked between the rooms,

Until the moss had reached our lips,

And covered up our names.

The play is heavily constructed around symbolism and metaphor, the most obvious being a captured Iguana which is tied at the end of a rope awaiting slaughter.  It represents the human condition. Shannon exclaims that he is going to go down there with a machete and cut the damn lizard loose so it can run back to the bushes because God won’t do it and we are going to play God today.  The very difficult role of Rev. Shannon is played by Tim Altmeyer who endeavors to express the anguish of this tortured character, but at times he makes Shannon appear more pathetic than desperate. Unfortunately, not all of Altmeyer’s dialogue could be easily heard (or understood) and therefore some of Williams’ brilliant language was lost on the audience. 

Although Shannon is “a man of the cloth,” Hannah’s own theology (her philosophy of living) gives her the power of redemption, Shannon admitting to her that he arrived, at this place in time, his voice choking, to meet someone who wants to help me, Miss Jelkes.  Williams’ stage direction describes Hannah as “remarkable looking – ethereal, almost ghostly.  She suggests a Gothic cathedral image of a medieval saint, but animated.  She could be thirty, she could be forty: she is totally feminine and yet androgynous-looking – almost timeless.”  Katie Cunningham masters the mysterious Hannah, capturing her delicacy on the one hand, and her steely strength on the other.  Her performance is almost certainly what Williams had in mind when he originally wrote the part for Katharine Hepburn (who was unavailable at the time the play was staged). 

Jelkes has traveled to Mexico with her 98 year old Grandfather, Nonno.  He is a “minor” poet who hasn’t written anything in decades, but is now working on what will be his last poem.  Hannah and Nonno, in spite of their obvious education and Nantucket upbringing, are now reduced to a peripatetic life of “depending on the kindness of strangers” to borrow from another Tennessee Williams play, Hannah doing quick artistic sketches and Nonno reciting some of his poems for money and room and board.  Dennis Creaghan, the seasoned professional, his ninth time on stage at Dramaworks, plays Nonno, deftly mines his character’s aging angst trying to finish his first poem in 20 years.

A group of German tourists are also guests at the hotel.   As it is the summer of 1940, they are closely following the Battle of Britain on the radio.  Their demonic, bacchanalian behavior – and their sense of arrogance, knowing that they are “right”-- is juxtaposed to the inner struggles of Hannah and Shannon to find themselves. 

If Hannah is a Freudian superego, the other key female character, Maxine, is clearly the id.  She is sultrily played by another Dramaworks veteran, Kim Cozort Kay.  Maxine was married to Fred, Shannon’s friend, a Hemingwayesque character who, unknown to Shannon, had just recently died.  Shannon detoured his tour group-- women from a Texas Baptist college --  to the Costa Verde Hotel in a last ditch effort to salvage his job with the third-rate Blake Tours, hoping that Fred would be able to rescue him.

The woman who engaged Blake Tours for the Mexican tour, Judith Fellowes, is enraged by misrepresentations made of the tour and by Shannon’s one night sexual encounter with the youngest woman in the group, the 16 year old Charlotte Goodall, played by Alexandra Grunberg making her Dramaworks debut.   Fellowes is a one-dimensional character (always angry) but a catalyst, off stage and on, for moving the action; she is played by long time south Florida actor, Irene Adjan. 

With Fred deceased, Shannon is now desperately dependent on Maxine as she is on him.  Prior to his unexpected arrival, she was a lonely widow being “serviced” by two young Mexican boys, her only source of intimate human contact after years of a celibate marriage.  She needs Shannon, but he is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.  He has suffered these episodes before (“the spook” as he refers to it), a condition Maxine is very familiar with.

Williams masterfully brings all of these themes together probing Hannah and Shannon’s relationship and their recognition that they are both damaged creatures, at the end of their ropes.   Ultimately Shannon has to be restrained in a hammock, much the same way as the Iguana is tied, while he is pursued by “the spook.”   Hannah rescues him as he ultimately rescues the Iguana.  She observes while he is tied up:  Who wouldn’t like to suffer and atone for the sins of himself and the world if it could be done in a hammock with ropes instead of nails, on a hill that’s so much lovelier than Golgotha, the Place of the Skull, Mr. Shannon?  There’s something almost voluptuous in the way that you twist and groan in that hammock – no nails, no blood, no death.  Isn’t that a comparatively comfortable, almost voluptuous kind of crucifixion to suffer for the guilt of the world, Mr. Shannon? 

The play culminates in Nonno’s completion of his poem, one that embodies Williams’ themes, man’s relationship to nature, to God, to death and to a new kind of love that transcends “the earth's obscene corrupting love.”  Full circle back to Emily Dickinson’s virtuous love of beauty and truth, the two main characters’ “failures” (“he whispered softly for what I failed”) being an intimate knowledge of one another, a kind of uncorrupted understanding.  It is Williams’ most hopeful play, or, as he put it “how to live with dignity after despair.”

Executing this play is complicated.  Hayes strives to walk that fine line of being trapped in symbolism and the melodramatic, so typical of the theatre in the early 1960s, seeking to attain a sense of heightened realism.  His assistant director is Paula D'Alessandris.  Hayes is skillfully supported by the incredibly talented Dramaworks technicians.

Scenic design by Michael Amico craftily captures the theatrical realism of a hotel in decay, the encroaching active jungle, alive with danger, and the symbolic isolation of the separate rooms on the verandah (I think of the tombs in Dickinson’s poem).  Paul Black’s lighting design works in harmony with the set, characterizing a wide range of lighting challenges, late afternoon sun, sunset, a long night, and a severe storm.   

Matt Corey’s sound design serves up that storm, echoes from the hills, and appropriate guitar interludes, all in sync with the production.  Brian O'Keefe, PBD resident costume designer creatively captures the era and the sweltering heat, as well as Hannah’s stealthy delicacy, as if she is indeed otherworldly.

Other members of the large cast are David Nail, Michael Collins, Brian Varela, Thomas Rivera, David Hyland, Becca McCoy, Rebecca Tucker, and Jordon Armstrong.

Dramaworks’ The Night of the Iguana is an ambitious production by one of America’s greatest playwrights.